


finger to palm

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [30]
Category: Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Canon - Book, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Dubious Consent Due To Mental Instability, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 19:28:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22003237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Andrew is fascinated with Lester’s hands whether he remembers that they’re Andrew and Lester or not.Maybe especially when not.
Relationships: Andrew Laeddis/Lester Sheehan
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 54
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	finger to palm

**Author's Note:**

> 030/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #98 – laughing.

The problem with madness in isolation, Lester thinks, is that it’s contagious. 

It’s not a  _ quick _ spread, of course. Sane men don’t go  _ in _ sane just because they come into contact with insanity. But spend enough time with it and you can’t help but be affected. You, the choices you make, the way you justify them. Spend years with madmen, befriend them, start to care for them more than the limited amount you should to be good at your profession, and you run the risk of becoming a little mad yourself. 

People did horrible, amoral things all the time because they loved the wrong person or loved the right person the wrong way. Lester has a list of patients as long as his arm who fit that description, who are at Ashecliffe because of it. The thought that his name could just as easily be scrawled onto that list, too, is discomfiting in a way Lester doesn’t like to think about. He doesn’t like to think about it at all.

He thinks about something else instead. Something like next to him in the cramped bottom bunk of the bed, Andrew’s bare skin pressed against his close enough for Lester to feel his breathing, his pulse beating, the sweat on that skin from the muggy summer heat and the things they’d done in this bed even though it was too hot for it dripping onto him and mingling with his own sweat and other fluids besides, the two of them pressed close for reasons that Lester are sure are only half about the lack of room for two grown men in a bed this small. 

If the bed were twice as big, they’d be just as close, he thinks, but Lester hasn’t confirmed that theory yet. He hasn’t taken Andrew back to his own bed in his own quarters across the island so far, hasn’t wanted to cross the indescribably significant bridge that making such a choice would be or what it would mean. 

More than that, he’ll admit shamefully in the privacy of his own mind, he just hasn’t had the opportunity. It’s been months since Andrew has been lucid enough to remember that he  _ is _ Andrew and while Dr. Lester Sheehan might have his own quarters and his own bed in those quarters on Shutter Island that he could convince Andrew would be more pleasant than the bottom of a bunk that they’ll have to leave soon enough so that they won’t get caught in such a state in it, Marshall Chuck Aule doesn’t and no matter what Lester has done so far, no matter how much of a bastard it makes him, the flitting ideas that run through his head about how Chuck might get Teddy into the supposedly missing Dr. Sheehan’s bed sit sickly in his stomach. 

It’s one thing to go along with Andrew’s delusions, another to take it so far as he has and to convince himself that it’s alright and that he isn’t doing Andrew any harm, that everything he’s done has been a help even, but Lester isn’t unaware of the house of cards he lives in. An extra bit of duplicity on top and he’s sure the whole thing will come down with him buried in a rubble of reds and blacks, death by a thousand paper cuts that bleed out all his shame.

If Lester said that to Andrew, he’d tell Lester he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about shame if all that tangles him up inside is who he crawls into bed with. If Chuck said it to Teddy, Teddy would tell Chuck to stop talking in metaphor and crawl into bed with him.

Sometimes Lester wonders if maybe he’s not the one who doesn’t know who he is after all. It’s all too easy to slip into being Chuck Aule, to pretend that Andrew is Teddy, and then forget who Chuck and Teddy are when Andrew is himself again. It’s addictive, being two different people, going back and forth. Contagious like a disease that starts in the head and eats its way down to the heart before it devours all the rest.

Next to him, Andrew holds one of Lester’s hands in his and thinks he’s Teddy holding Chuck’s hand. He looks at the palm with all the attention a heart surgeon might look at an open chest cavity, running his index finger up the center of it. The familiar touch sends a pleasant tingle of interest up Lester’s spent groin and he almost wants to get hard again, to go again, but he knows they haven’t got the time before the orderlies who are actually supposed to sleep in this room will be back from their duties outside.

Lester thinks Cawley knows about them already, can tell it from the way he looks at them when they’re Teddy and Chuck walking around together as two partnered Marshalls trying to solve a nonexistent crime and the way he looks when they’re Andrew and Lester and they sit a little too close on the ground, talking with their heads nearly knocking together in soft tones better suited to kids having clandestine meetings under the bleachers than a doctor and patient. Cawley hasn’t said a word about it, not to Lester and obviously not to Andrew when he’s Teddy. If he’s said anything to Andrew when he’s sane, Lester is afraid to ask and Andrew hasn’t offered. 

Lester gets the impression that Cawley pities Andrew enough to allow it or to pretend he doesn’t see it, if only because it makes Andrew a little more stable to have someone by his side whether he knows who he is or not. Lester also gets the impression that Cawley pities him, too, for caring too much for Andrew, so much more than he should, but only so much as Cawley pities himself for the same reason. 

Still, though. No reason to get caught and have Cawley’s suspicions confirmed, if he does have them. Especially no reason to be caught by someone who might say what they’ve seen to the wrong person, the wrong person being anyone who isn’t Andrew and Lester themselves.

“You’re always so interested in my hands, boss,” Lester murmurs. He flexes the fingers on the hand Andrew is holding but makes no effort to pull it away. He has no desire to, time be damned. “Starting to think you have a fetish for ‘em.”

“A hand fetish?” Andrew repeats. His lips quirk. He casts a wry glance at Lester from the side, amused. “That a thing?”

Lester grins back. “Oh, you’d know more about that than me, wouldn’t you?”

Andrew laughs softly. “Okay. Maybe you’re on to something, doc.”

Lester’s grin freezes on his face. His breath catches in his throat just at that one little word.

Andrew doesn’t notice. He goes on, ignorant, “Have any other kinks you want to diagnose me with? I like your hair quite a bit too, Chuck, you know? Maybe if I tell Cawley that he’ll think me a bad enough headcase to have me dragged up to the lighthouse and we can finally figure out what they’ve got hidden away in there.”

A rush of breath escapes Lester’s mouth that could be passed off as a laugh. It isn’t one. Lester’s pounding pulse settles back down again in his chest.

“More likely he’ll just throw you in the ocean and tell you to cool it, lover boy,” he says. And then: “My hair?”

Andrew glances at it for a second. “Sure, it’s good hair. Shiny, soft. I like the curls. If you grew it out, it’d be nicer than most girls’ hair, I think.”

“Christ, listen to you.” Lester laughs. “I think I would like to see you tell Cawley that, actually. The look on his face would almost make being on this island worth it.”

“Gotta get our kicks somewhere, don’t we? And what kind of radical treatment do you think he’d recommend to rid me of the thought?”

“He’d tell you to lay off the bad poetry, first of all.”

“Read more Byron instead?”

“I said lay  _ off _ the bad poetry, Teddy, not read the worst of it.” 

Andrew laughs more strongly at that. It’s quiet, the way he laughs, not big in sound but in feeling. It still manages to shake the little bed in its silent merriment anyway. “Okay, how’s this for bad poetry--”

Lester groans, acting put on, but he’s horribly aware of how much he’s smiling. How his grin is so big it makes the muscles at the corner of either side of his mouth ache. How it’s only ever in moments like this with Andrew when Andrew still thinks that he’s Teddy and Lester is Chuck and they’re two partners against the world that he’s like this.

“Your hands are the strangest part of your body, you know?” Andrew says. His voice is surprisingly earnest. It always is.

Despite himself, Lester holds up the hand Andrew isn’t holding and looks at it. “Alright, you’ve got me curious. Strange how?”

“Soft,” Andrew answers immediately, definitively. He pauses for a long second. “Delicate….graceful. They’re not a cop’s hands or a soldier’s hands, you know? You’ve got hands like a, a –“

Lester holds his breath, waits.

Andrew’s voice falters. Then his whole face falters with it. The classic look of a man who’s lost his thought mid-sentence. “Well, I don’t know. Like a piano player, maybe.”

Lester breathes. He spares himself a second to think about how charmed he is at that, how charming he finds it even though this isn’t the first time Andrew has said it or the first time they’ve had some variation of this conversation as Teddy and Chuck even if Andrew doesn’t know it. 

He spares himself a second more to think about how curious it is that the profession Andrew names is different every time.

This time Lester’s hands are like a piano player’s hands. Sometimes they’re like a baker’s or a swimmer’s. One time Andrew told him his hands were like the hands of a girl in a massage parlor he once visited overseas and then grinned at him, face full of innuendo, and Lester had laughed until he thought he’d choke to death on the sound.

And occasionally Andrew will say he has a doctor’s hands and Lester’s world will stop on its axis for a moment before he can make some joke about it or some segue, a moment where he has to viciously stamp down the reckless urge to say  _ well actually I am a doctor _ , an impulse Lester is sure comes from the same place in the mind that causes people to want to pull fire alarms in schools or start screaming things like  _ rapist _ or  _ kidnapper _ when in a crowd.

Even when Andrew is cognizant and aware of who he is and who Lester is and is entirely, starkly sane for the moment until he forgets who he is again, he’ll always hold Lester’s hand just like he’s doing now and say he should have known Lester wasn’t a Marshall from the start because of his hands, so unsuited to the job, so fumbling with his fake gun and badge. 

Lester was only half joking when he said Andrew has a hand fetish. Andrew is fascinated with his hands no matter who he is or who he thinks Lester is. He likes to look at them and touch them all the same and Lester – god help him – can’t stop himself from indulging.

Whether he’s indulging himself or indulging Andrew, though, he couldn’t begin to speculate.

“A piano player, huh?” Lester says, nonchalant-like. He turns the hand Andrew is holding fast as a trick to catch Andrew’s hand with it and interlace their fingers together. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get over how intimate that feels, the slide of his fingers sliding down someone else’s, slotting into the space between them. Not ever. He doesn’t think he’ll ever admit out loud that’s exactly why he does it, either. If he did he’s sure Andrew would tease him that he’s the one with the hand fetish after all. 

Andrew’s face flushes pink, such a soft shade Lester wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t looking. Lester is looking, though. He feels like he’s always looking these days. “Sure, why not? You ever play any pianos up in Portland?” 

“Seattle,” Lester corrects good-naturedly. “And no, can’t say that I did. Not well, at least. I’ve got the foggiest memory about trying to play a piano once in a bar but I must’ve been drunk off my ass. Either that or they threw me out head first for butchering Bach and knocked the night right out of me. Might’ve been a dream, though. You dream a lot, boss?”

“About playing the piano?”

“About piano players.”

“Oh. No, see, I thought I did but then the guy I dream about told me he couldn’t play the piano after all.”

Lester shoots Andrew a knowing look and catches Andrew looking just as knowingly back, a little smile tugging at his mouth. “Sounds disappointing. You go through all the trouble of dreaming about a man and he can’t even be bothered to play a round of Three Blind Mice for you.”

“I’ve had worse dates. Besides,” Andrew squeezes Lester’s hand. Lester’s groin gives another tingle of interest and he tells himself again that they don’t have time. “it’s not the piano I like having his hands on.”

“And dare I ask, Marshall, what you like having this man’s hands on? A violin, maybe? A guitar? A flute?”

“Flute?” Andrew repeats wryly. “Sure, fine. I think a flute works. Let’s call it that.”

They really don’t have the time, Lester thinks helplessly. They really, really don’t.

All the same, he can’t stop himself from saying, “You don’t play the flute with just your hands, boss. Didn’t you know that?”

And Andrew looks at him with interest just like Lester knew he would. His eyes drop down to Lester’s mouth, to where Lester is biting down on his lip to keep his smile from spreading further. It’s not doing much good, he knows. The interest on Andrew’s face doubles, triples, multiplies to infinite degrees before smoothing over to blankness as Andrew tries to hide it.

Not quite totally blank, though. His lips are pursed, Lester notes. They always are when he’s bluffing.

“The orderlies will be back soon,” Andrew says. He’s trying to sound mock stern but it comes off a little too breathless to work. The want thick enough to break through that brittle attempt at pretending for a second that he has any desire to do the responsible thing.

“Mmm.”

“Be a hell of a thing if they came back while we were in the middle of it.”

“Hell of a thing.”

“Cawley might commit us directly to Ward C if  _ he _ found out.”

“Oh, I don’t know, boss. I think Cawley would understand.”

_ That _ gets Lester a raised brow. “Oh?”

“The way he talks about that car of his, I imagine he’s stuck more than just one kind of nozzle in its gas tank. Man has no right to judge where we put ours.”

Andrew lets out a startled guffaw. He presses his face into Lester’s neck to muffle it and Lester can feel the smile against his skin, the soft press of lips against his throat. He shivers. 

“Nozzles, Chuck? I thought we were talking about flutes?”

Lester glances at the window, at the sun still shining through it, still half high in the sky. It’s Friday. The orderlies always like spending Friday evenings in the common room playing poker and always spend plenty of time smoking and shooting the breeze outside for longer than usual before that. They still have a little time, he figures. They have enough time.

“Alright, boss, let’s go back to flutes. How about I play you a song after all?”

Andrew’s body shudders against his once and relaxes. He goes boneless. The last shred of resistance gives away like it was never there at all. “Three Blind Mice, Chuck?”

Lester’s grinning when he turns into Andrew’s body. Grinning softly, gently, full of care. “Sure, boss. Let’s go with that. I’ll tap the tune out with my tongue.”

Andrew shudders again, harder this time, and Lester slides his body down under the sheets.

He doesn’t unlace his hand from Andrew’s. He holds on to it like a life line, resting low on Andrew’s stomach the whole time.


End file.
